The Fence: A Police Cover-Up Along Boston's Racial Divide (22 page)

Daley was apparently not sure what to say or what to do. He was tongue-tied, but he also wasn’t alone in “showing leg,” or offering a hint of information of evidentiary value. Jimmy Burgio, down in the first-floor lobby, walked over to another one of the gang unit officers and said, “I think one of your guys got beat up by mistake.” But, as with Daley, no one followed up in earnest, and Burgio said no more. It became another potential lead lost in the paralysis. Then the most tantalizing tidbit came from Dave Williams. Outside the guardroom, he caught up to Craig Jones walking down the hallway.

“I think my partner hit your partner by accident,” he said.

Craig stopped. His investigatory gears kicked in. He pictured Mike’s bloodied head on the pavement. Where’s Burgio’s flashlight? he asked. Williams said Burgio probably had it with him. Where’s Burgio? Craig then asked. He’s gone, Williams said.

Burgio had already left the station, and no one went after him. No one got the flashlight. Burgio was “8-boy,” police radio code for “nowhere to be found.”

The answers were right there in the guardroom. But no one came clean—and no one took charge and insisted upon it. No one called a time-out on all the bobbing and weaving to demand better. No one pounced on the leads—the incriminating and suggestive statements that in the light of the next day, and in the days that followed, began to be taken back, spun differently, or flat-out denied. The media were expecting police reports to continue its coverage about the hair-raising high-speed chase, portraying the arrests as a hugely successful police moment, and the few hints at the truth were choked off by a toxic blend of cop ego and cop cover-up. Mike’s beating was a public relations disaster that would only steal a great headline about departmental heroics.

Sergeant Thomas allowed Donald Caisey’s flawed injury report to go through—a minimalist composition of twelve handwritten lines in one ungrammatical paragraph: “Officer Cox lost is [
sic
] footing on a puddle of ice causing him [to] lose his balance and fall forward striking his head on a marked cruiser. Officer Cox then fell backward on the ground striking the back of his head on the ground. As a result of this Officer Cox sustained head injuries causing him to lose consciousness for a short period of time.”

No mention was made of all the blood, of Mike’s cuts on his mouth, the three-inch cut on his forehead and other facial cuts, the stitches, the egg-sized hematoma, the bruising to his midsection, the hand and its torn ligament, the kidney damage. No mention was made of the truth everyone at the station knew by daybreak—Mike was beaten.

The result was this: an initial official record of the event that was false—a record that kept the story simple and singularly about police success and that postponed the negative about Mike. But the phony reports—mirroring Sergeant Dovidio’s handiwork at the scene—were tantamount to a license to lie. Once the lies began, where would they end?

Lying in pain in one of the cubicles in the critical care unit, Mike had tried to be helpful when the doctors asked him about his injuries. “The doctor asked me a lot of times what happened to me, and I couldn’t really tell him.” He had been glad to see his wife when she arrived. He didn’t expect his mother to come, but was not surprised she did. In his fog, he saw officers coming and going, but much of it was a blur. Sergeant Thomas, Donald Caisey—he recognized them. His partner, Craig, was there, and before the night was over, Craig’s hand was put in a cast. It turned out he’d broken a finger either when he punched Tiny Evans or when he slipped on the hill. Mike heard Richie Walker in the room say he’d seen him running toward the fence after someone, and Walker’s comments helped Mike remember for the first time he’d been involved in a foot chase toward the fence.

Most memorably, he heard Dave Williams come in and say, “I think cops did this.” He’d heard his mother gasp, and his first reaction was to worry about her. “She began making statements like, ‘Oh, God,’ and I just remember wanting to have a conversation calming her down because it was bad enough. She hated the way I looked and thought that I was going to die right there. I just wanted to calm her down.”

It was vintage Mike, worrying about what others were thinking.

Kimberly, meanwhile, was left speechless. She didn’t know what to think, but soon enough she began smoldering inside. She kept returning her gaze to the large bump on Mike’s head. “It was a huge mass,” she said. To her, it was proof Mike had been hit hard. The idea made her furious: Mike had been attacked by other officers who’d crossed the line from reasonable to excessive force. They’d hit him and then run.

“They shouldn’t have left him,” she said.

Mike picked up on his wife’s anger. But, of course, he was mostly in the dark, and his family was focused on his care, not getting to the bottom of his beating. The doctors wanted to admit him for further treatment. Kimberly had a different idea. She wanted to take Mike home. “I could watch him closer.” By her calculation, her one-on-one care was better than, say, a ratio of one hospital nurse for every five patients. She was graduating in five months from medical school, and she’d done a rotation in neurology at the New England Medical Center. She was confident she knew what to look for.

“I just felt I could give him better care at home.”

So while daylight spread over the city, Kimberly brought Mike home to the two-family house on Supple Street in Dorchester owned by one of Mike’s sisters. The light outside bothered Mike and made him squint. Voices made him cringe. His head pounded. Walking unsteadily to the house, he felt the world spinning. He could not think straight.

His sons, Mike Jr. and Nick, were waiting, wondering why their parents weren’t home when they awoke. “They really looked up to my husband,” Kimberly said. The boys sometimes talked about growing up to be a police officer like their father. “He’s this big guy,” she said. “Daddy, you know, is invincible.” The boys had never really seen their father sick or off his feet. “All of a sudden, he’s been knocked down.”

Nick, who had turned five earlier in the month, hung back while his father was helped into bed. Then he slowly walked into his parents’ bedroom—and he froze. He turned and ran quickly from the sleeping giant—from the man who was supposed to be his father but whose misshapen and monstrous-looking face was unrecognizable.

Nearly a week passed before Nick ventured back.

CHAPTER 10

No Official Complaint

S
ometime during Mike’s first night home he bolted up in bed. It was a sudden and nearly violent movement. Kimberly awakened immediately. She saw that Mike was soaked in his own sweat.

What’s wrong? she asked.

Mike didn’t respond. His shoulders shuddered, as if trying to hide something.

Then Kimberly heard: Mike was crying.

Mike? she said.

Mike wasn’t sure what was going on. He felt frightened to the bone, a feeling that was crystal clear, even though he’d come home woozy from a combination of his injuries and the medications doctors had him taking—painkillers and antibiotics. Fear raced through his body like an electrical current, and he couldn’t seem to get control of it.

Mike, Kimberly said. What’s wrong?

When he first sat up it had all seemed so very real. But then he heard Kimberly’s voice and began to realize where he was—in bed next to his wife. The house was quiet. He’d had a nightmare.

Kimberly asked about what. But Mike wouldn’t say. More wakeful, he grew self-conscious about crying. Embarrassment replaced the fear. The two emotions were foreign to a man known for his poise and courage.

What was it? Kimberly asked again.

Mike still wouldn’t say. “He just didn’t want to talk about it,” she said.

The nightmare wasn’t a one-time occurrence. It came back the next night and again most nights in the weeks to come. In it, men in blue uniforms were after him. They were Boston policemen; Mike recognized the uniforms. But he didn’t know who they were; they were faceless. They invaded his house and were usually armed. They opened fire as they came toward him. Mike had his gun, but he was one against many.

Eventually Mike talked to Kimberly about the dreams. “The theme is usually the same,” Kimberly said. “Our house is being stormed by several policemen with guns and he’s shooting back. They’re shooting and they’re killing us.”

Kimberly’s commuting to Philadelphia for medical school had slowed down during her fourth year. She’d arranged to do her training in Boston area hospitals and was mostly home. The flexibility was fortuitous. Once Mike got hurt, she was able to stay with Mike to oversee his care and work on comforting the boys.

To protect Mike Jr. and Nick from the truth, she actually adopted the official explanation for his injuries. The next day she told them their father had banged his head after slipping on ice. Five-year-old Nick, in particular, was scared his father was going to die. She reassured him he was not. But Nick stayed frightened and easily upset. Kimberly found herself putting Nick to bed early and sitting with him until he fell asleep.

The boy’s fright tore Mike up. “He wouldn’t talk to me.” Mike was bedridden and helpless to do much of anything his first week home. It was like he was trapped in a thick fog. He hated to move. The slightest turn caused the room to rock. “I couldn’t get up quickly, or turn my head quickly,” he said. “I would get dizzy and fall.” The best chance to keep the world still was to move in slow motion. To go to the bathroom the morning he got home, he shuffled across the bedroom, and that’s when he saw for himself what he’d overheard at the hospital: His urine was “very dark, dark, with strands of like red in it.”

His mind was off speed too. He couldn’t find the words to complete a sentence. He would start, and then the words seemed to slip through his fingers. When he wanted to call out to one of his sons, he couldn’t. It was like his mind was stuttering.

“Just to remember my kids’ names was, like, a struggle.”

It was scary, and Mike was a wreck. Neither his body nor his mind felt like it belonged to him. Following an examination, a neurologist concluded that Mike had post-concussive syndrome and post-traumatic vestibular vertigo, medical-speak for what was causing his splitting headaches, dizziness, memory loss, and cognitive difficulties.

No matter how much he slept, he continued to feel sluggish. “I went out to a doctor’s appointment, came back, and lay back down.” In a way, not much had changed since right before he blacked out near the fence: He felt tired and just wanted to go to sleep. The last thing he wanted to do was talk about what happened.

Mike may not have felt much like talking, but others did. His mother, his sisters, and Kimberly were boiling mad about the beating and right away wanted Mike to do
something
, even if they didn’t know specifically what that meant. Within days of his coming home, his sister Lillian wanted to photograph Mike’s face to document visually the extensive swelling, bruising, cuts, and bumps. She and the others told Mike that the police department was going to try to sweep the beating under the rug unless he took action.

Mike began hearing the same message from beyond his immediate family. Leaders from the local chapter of the NAACP and the Nation of Islam called the house. Mike had never been active politically or religiously. “I was amazed how many people got my phone number,” he said. The groups had heard about Mike’s beating through talk on the street, and they wanted him to do something about it. “What do you want to do?” they’d ask. One day Mike took a call from another black cop on the force. Mike didn’t know the other cop very well, but that didn’t stop the caller from getting into Mike’s business. “He’s asking me how I’m doing,” Mike said, “and then his tone changed and he said, ‘I’ve known you for a while and I’ve always respected you, but if you don’t do something I’ve lost all respect for you, as a person, as a black man, as a police officer.’”

Mike didn’t want any of it. To him, it was all noise and static. The ground beneath him was already unsteady—literally—and he was having enough trouble finding his footing. “I was just happy to be alive,” he said. “I’m just trying to deal with the day-to-day, with my injuries.” So he refused to let his sister photograph him. He rebuffed any other calls to action—there’d be no protests, no press conferences.

Instead, he told his wife, mother, and sisters it would all work out. They fired back that Mike was being naive. “They were like, ‘Why are you so trusting? What’s wrong, can’t you see?’” But Mike would not budge. They didn’t understand cops. They didn’t understand the split-second decisions of a high-speed chase. They couldn’t put themselves in the beaters’ shoes as could Mike. “Maybe, you know, they thought I was the murderer,” he said. “So maybe trying to arrest me was justified.”

Mike’s first instincts were true blue. The severity of the thrashing notwithstanding, Mike got that it had been a terrible mistake. Unlike his family, he didn’t see making a federal case out it. Friends from the gang unit came by the house the first week to check on him. He wasn’t up for talking much, but he listened, and Craig Jones told him what Dave Williams said about his partner, Burgio, messing up. Mike heard from Dave Williams, and Mike thought Dave sounded “very apologetic.” From others he heard gossip the brass was giving those responsible some time—a grace period, of sorts—to come forward before any kind of intense internal probe was begun. The tidbits gave Mike the idea this was going to get resolved and settled in a way he preferred both personally and as part of the fraternity himself—quietly and within the organization. “I felt this loyalty to police in general.” He was optimistic, knowing full well police officers tended to protect another suspected of misconduct. But he also believed this went beyond any unspoken code of silence. When the victim was one of your own, it was a different ball game.

Mike was figuring that within days he’d hear from the cops who’d beaten him. He was counting on an apology. “I expected the individuals to come forward and say what they had done.” They’d get disciplined in some fashion. Then they’d all move on.